An extensible scripting language for interactive animation in a speech-enabled virtual environment

Character animations on most virtual environment systems are canned motions created off-line through motion capture techniques. The motions are then encoded and transmitted with a fixed format and played at the client side. In this paper, we have proposed an XML-based scripting language, called eXtensible Animation Markup Language (XAML), to describe interactive dialog-based animations. The language is designed to describe character animations at various command levels and to compose a new animation from existing animation clips. In addition, the language is extended to incorporate other dialog-based scripting language such as VoiceXML. We have implemented such a system in Java that can interpret the language and render 3D animations based on the user's interactive voice commands.